Obsessively fearful of a nuclear catastrophe, lonely, middle-aged bachelor Philippe decides to construct a fall-out shelter in his back yard, concealing the fact from his friends and family. He may wish to face the day of judgement in isolated splendour, but he has reckoned without the arrival of angry young teenager Kelly, whose own subterranean needs threaten to turn his plans on their head.

Set in the isolated badlands on the eastern border of France with Switzerland, Bye Bye Kelly is Mathieu Z’graggen’s first feature film, a tragicomedy about loneliness and the need for human contact. In the manner of Jim Jarmush and Aki Kaurismäki, Z’graggen homes in on the telling detail, exploring with humour and poetry the downward pressures of economic deprivation, boredom and exposure – not to nuclear waste, but to the doomladen news headlines that distort the perceptions of ordinary human beings into superstition.